John Muir and the Feminist Movement

by Ron Limbaugh

Was John Muir sympathetic toward the 19th century feminism?
Did he view the rights of women in the same light as the rights of animals?
Until recently
it was not possible to explore these questions because of the lack of
primary resources.
Before 1970 the subject of Muir and his relationship with women was
delicately side-stepped by scholars who were unable to win the confidence
of Muir's heirs.
Since then a new generation of heirs opened the papers,
and the result has been the emergence of new lines of critical inquiry.
Stephen Fox's book,
John Muir and His Legacy
, first critically analyzed Muir's relationship
with Jeanne Carr and Elvira Hutchings.
Muir biographies by Michael Cohen
and Frederick Turner also delved into personal history,
yet neither addressed the questions I have asked above,
questions that surfaced repeatedly during
my research on the origins and evolution of Muir's dog story,
"
Stickeen
."

Darwinians in the late Victorian era raised three troubling issues
of special interest to Muir:
the ethical relationship between humans and animals,
the nature and extent of animal intelligence,
and the status of the soul in higher animals.
Of less direct impact on the dog manuscript,
but still influential in shaping Muir's thinking during the long Stickeen
gestation,
was a fourth question that grew out of the debates on the other three:
did all sentient beings, including women,
have fundamental rights men were bound to respect?

As Muir worked on the meaning of Stickeen he saw the logic of
extending the equality argument to women.
But on general questions of feminism his heart and head were divided.
Though sympathetic to the legal and moral plight of women,
his was a masculine world where language
and culture and tradition defined gender roles.
Suffragettes might have a point,
but his "fellow creatures" had a higher priority.
Torn by countervailing forces Muir remained ambivalent.
Not so his friend Henry S. Salt.
As the women's movement surged in the wake of Darwinism,
Salt made friends with feminists.
Drawing parallels between animals, slaves and women,
he conceived of a grand coalition,
a union of activists for the promotion of both human and animal rights.
Middle class compassion for the downtrodden had fed the fires of antebellum
reform in America,
and Salt counted on this universal capacity for sympathy,
"the very essence of the human,"
to promote "a wide sense of brotherhood with all sentient beings."
[1]

Drawing a connection between women's rights and animal rights was nothing new.
The relationship dates from the beginnings of the Romantic
era with its broad emotional and moral appeals
to protect the innocent victims of immoral society.
Ethicists today see the nexus as part of a larger picture,
a "continuing struggle" over the last two centuries "to enlarge the
boundaries of moral community."
[2]
But for most of the 19th century
linkage was a definite liability both to feminists and animal sympathizers.
Opponents of moral reform drew absurd analogies between
women and animals in a perverse attempt to
discredit the women's movement through ridicule.
The derision surfaced as early as 1793,
a year after publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's pioneer suffragist tract,
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
.
If women achieve the right to vote,
asked the anonymous author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Beasts
, "why not cats and dogs?"
[3]
The same forces that held women in moral bondage to
men also kept them from asserting the rights of animals.

Reformers also had to contend with the more traditional approach to
animal protection led by conservative animal shelter organizations like
the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In the half-century since its founding,
the RSPCA and its American counterparts had been led by upper-class
elites who found humanitarian appeals preferable to revolutionary
polemics on the rights of animals.
"Radicals" were purged from the English SPCA
-- meaning Jews, vegetarians, feminists,
and anyone else that might be unconventional or too liberal.
Americans simply avoided them.
In both cases the remaining leaders were
safely orthodox Christian, masculine, and upper-class.

SPCAs generally did not engage in rhetorical debates
over the nature of animal rights.
The backbone of their support came from status-conscious middle-classes
who looked to the elites for leadership and models.
SPCAs also siphoned off most Victorian women
who felt pangs of conscience for both animals and other "brutes",
including the impoverished lower classes seen in ever greater numbers
as industrialization spread across the western world.
Humanitarian sentiment toward the downtrodden animals
was a safe and reassuring act of Christian love
that avoided disturbing ideological or philosophical issues.
The primary objective was to eliminate the worst abuses and educate the abusers
-- usually the lower classes --
on the Christian virtues of kindness and sympathy.
SPCAs in America and England, by and large,
became safe havens for upper classes and their
middle class allies who felt they were doing something to improve society
while not threatening its basic values
[4]
.

By the latter part of the 19th century a revived feminism threatened
to undermine the conventional approach to animal protection as well as
the old SPCA power structure.
The confrontation between feminists and reactionaries
now took on a new Darwinian twist.
Opponents of women's rights used evolution theory to
argue that suffrage would violate the laws of nature.
Natural selection, they said,
demonstrated "that the highest forms of life were most specialized.
Therefore, the proposal that woman invade man's sphere must be
retrogressive rather than progressive."
[5]
By the same reasoning a New York physician concluded
that women were inferior to men because of their "comparative
indifference to pain."
His deduction was based on a common 19th century presumption that the
"higher classes and nations are more sensitive to physical suffering than
the lower classes and barbarous tribes,"
and that "in all grades of civilization the
men are more sensitive than the women."
But feminists could play the same game.
Turning the learned doctor's syllogism on its head,
one indignant woman retorted that since men are stronger than women,
and since brute strength characterizes savage societies,
therefore men are savage brutes
[6]
.

On the West Coast the resurgent women's movement penetrated the
inner circles of power,
including humanitarian organizations like the Bay Area SPCAs.
While John Muir worked on his Stickeen text in Martinez,
just 20 miles away some of his friends debated
the meaning of evolution for both humans and animals.
One was Sarah J. McChesney, an Oakland housewife who loved animals.
Twenty years after Muir had boarded in the McChesney household while writing up
his Sierra glaciation theories,
Mrs. McChesney became a director of the Oakland SPCA,
defying the traditional subordination of women members
[7]
.
Not reticent to speak out on the implications of Darwinism,
she said evolution had reversed Cartesian logic.
If souls were necessary for sentience,
then "most assuredly" animals had souls.
The remark of course had religious implications,
for orthodox Christianity denied that animals were immortal.
On that question both McChesney and Charles B. Holbrook,
secretary of the San Francisco SPCA,
boldly asserted that dogs and other sentient animals had a rightful place in
heaven
[8]
.

That same logic could also be used against anti-feminists who denied
that women had souls.
This was simply a religious extension of Cartesian theory,
based on the pre-Darwinian premise that souls were necessary for
sentience and that women were less sentient than men.
Mrs. McChesney's reported remarks stopped short of challenging
the conventional western religious view of women,
but another Muir friend was more outspoken.
Mary McHenry Keith,
a San Francisco attorney and wife of Muir's closest friend William Keith,
played a prominent regional role in the cause of women's rights
[9]
.
She was also an animal rights activist, asserting, with Sarah McChesney,
that animal sentience no longer could be disputed.
In response to a reporter's inquiry she boldly linked the cause of
women and animals.
Both were sentient beings with immortal souls.
Mary Wollstonecraft had been vindicated at last!
Mrs. Keith even suggested western Christianity could learn something
from Hindu teachings on the "transmigration of souls" after death
[10]
.
As we have seen,
Muir had explored the idea earlier
and had even mentioned it in his final draft of Stickeen,
but his editor had tossed it out as a "digression."

If Muir liked some feminist views on animal rights, on the role of
women in society Mary Keith's outspoken opinions must have troubled him.
He had friends on both sides of the issue.
The Keiths themselves were divided
-- the landscape artist refused to take his wife seriously,
perhaps in retaliation for her refusal to take an interest
in his Swedenborgian views.
He was a notorious tease, poking fun at the feminists,
even playing the fool dressed as Susan B. Anthony at a gathering of friends.
Presumably he was polite when Anthony herself visited the Keiths
at their Berkeley home on her West Coast tour in 1895
[11]
.

William Keith was a light-hearted anti-feminist,
but another Muir acquaintance took a harder line.
Joseph LeConte, geology professor at the
University of California
and a radical Darwinist
[12]
,
was outspoken in his attack on the suffragettes.
Recalling the Wollstonecraft lampoon a century earlier,
he said if women should vote so should children,
and if children voted so should horses and dogs.
Once more evolution theory came to the service of the Social Darwinists.
The "intelligence of man & beast differs only in degree," he asserted,
presumably meaning man in the generic sense.
Within the human species, however,
male dominance simply confirmed the inexorable consequences
of natural selection
[13]
.

Muir pondered these anti-feminist remarks and found further
opposition in his readings.
He noted that Thoreau had reported conversing with a feminist but
found the experience unenlightening.
"You had to substitute courtesy for sense and argument," he wrote.
"The championess of woman's rights still asks you to be a ladies' man....
I fear that to the last woman's lectures will demand
mainly courtesy from man."
[14]
Parkman was even more blunt,
writing in exasperation after listening to a "noise party in the cars":
"Is not a half educated vulgar weak woman a disgusting animal?
Where there is no education at all and no pretension,
the matter is all very well
-- where high education and good sense are united is very well indeed;
but the half and half genteel -- damn them!"
[15]

But for every nay-sayer there were positive voices.
Muir was impressed by the outspoken views of John Stuart Mill,
who had fought for women's suffrage in the House of Commons.
"He disliked to think that there were any
fundamental differences in mind and character between the sexes,"
said Richard T. Ely in a review Muir thought worthy of notice
[16]
.
Nearer home, Ina Coolbrith and Katherine Graydon,
both close friends of Muir,
took prominent roles in the Bay Area suffrage movement
[17]
.
Like some Civil War families,
on the women's issue friends and relatives stood divided.
One of the friendly critics was Theodore Hittell,
who mocked Carrie Chapman Catt at the same party that Keith mimicked Anthony.
However, his daughter Catherine, nicknamed "Kittie,"
was an active feminist in San Francisco.
Both Hittells corresponded with Muir and visited him occasionally
[18]
.

How much Muir was influenced by these conflicting opinions is
impossible to measure.
His journals and notes reveal no discernible pattern to his thinking
on the women's question.
Perhaps he consciously tried to avoid taking sides for the sake of his family,
for even in his own household there were voices of discord.
Muir's wife Louisiana, or "Louie" as she was universally known,
is a reclusive figure in the Muir story.
Presumably she followed her husband's views,
but his eldest daughter Wanda was influenced by her Berkeley boarding
school experience.
Later she attended the
University of California
for at least two years,
although not long enough to graduate.
Muir opposed sending Wanda off to school.
He believed women should be educated at home
-- in contrast to the views of his next-door neighbor and friend John Swett,
one of the fathers of public education in California
[19]
.
Whether this conservatism extended to the suffrage
issue cannot be directly determined from the paltry evidence left behind,
but Wanda's independence in matters of education and marriage caused at least a
temporary rift in the Muir household and may have been rooted to more
basic differences on the matter of women's rights.
The fact that Muir chummed with
some outspoken anti-feminists lends credence to this view.
On the other hand he stood
with the feminists on fundamental philosophical questions,
rejecting anti-feminist dogmas based on the presumptive inequality of sex
or species.
Regardless of how he felt personally, his frequent contacts with activists
on both sides of the issue provide an intriguing backdrop for further study.
The story of Muir's outlook on the feminist movement has more chapters to come.

Women were minority members and only occasionally officers
until after the turn of the century in both the Oakland and San Francisco SPCAs.
The San Jose branch, however,
apparently had a much larger female contingent by the mid-1890s than
other humane societies in the Bay Area.
San Francisco Call
,
July 19, 1892, p. 8, c. 2; August 28, 1896, p. 11 c. 2; March
19, 1897, p. 9, c. 5; July 19, 1898,p. 7, c. 4.

"Have Animals Souls," JMP UOPWA.
Another controversial woman
leader in both feminist and animal causes was the wife of
Charles Holbrook, the San Francisco SPCA Secretary.
In 1903 anonymous accusations were brought against both Holbrooks,
he for "neglecting his duty in order to visit theaters and music halls,"
she for conducting herself "in an unladylike manner in the society's offices,"
"being generally disagreeable," and,
on her absentee husband's behalf,
having "administered the affairs of the charity during his absence."
A majority of trustees, however,
recognizing Mrs. Holbrook's outstanding efforts
to educate school education on the proper treatment of animals,
supported her and her husband and dismissed the charges.
San Francisco Call
, February 22, 1903, p. 27, c. 2.

Brother Cornelius, Keith: Old Master of California
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1942), v. 1, pp. 349-353, 373-374.
After the turn of the century Keith became more sympathetic toward
the suffragettes,
even donating paintings to help his wife raise money for the cause.
Upon his death in 1911
the National American Woman Suffrage Association included his name
in memorial resolutions adopted for "prominent suffragests who
had died during the year."
The History of Woman Suffrage
, v. 5, p. 320.